Ivanka Trump calls for religious tolerance

Washington, (IANS) Ivanka Trump, US President Donald Trump’s oldest daughter and a Jewish convert, has issued a statement on Twitter calling for “religious tolerance” after a wave of threats against the community, a media report said.

Her tweet on Monday was by far the most vocal foray into a public discussion and was made over an issue her allies said she feels personally, New York Times reported.

“America is a nation built on the principle of religious tolerance. We must protect our houses of worship and religious centres. #JCC,” the tweet said that was posted after she wrote, and then deleted, an earlier one moments beforehand.

Ivanka Trump converted to Judaism before marrying her husband Jared Kushner, an Orthodox Jew, putting her in a position to be a prominent voice at a moment when several anti-Semitic episodes have taken place around the country.

Her previous substantive effort in the White House involved convening a women’s business council, an event she helped create, when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada visited the President.

On Monday, 11 separate bomb scares were called into Jewish community centres around the country. They were the latest in a string of such threats since the beginning of the year.

A spokesman for Trump did not respond to an email seeking comment about whether the President would condemn them as well.

Trump, a prolific user of Twitter, had not weighed in by late Monday.

But he was criticised in the past as slow to condemn anti-Semitic comments, and his candidacy was hailed by White nationalists and White supremacists throughout 2016.

On Thursday, at his first lengthy news conference alone as President, Trump was asked by a reporter for a Jewish magazine how the government plans to respond to the increase in such anti-Semitic incidents.

The President responded angrily, saying the question was “insulting” and that he was the “least anti-Semitic person in the world”.